A study of adult Culicidae ecology was carried out from January 1992 through January 1993 at the rice irrigation system of the Ribeira Valley Experimental Station. The adaptation of Anopheles albitarsis to the anthropic environment became evident through the adult collections made at its various habitats represented by the irrigation system and the edge of the residual pond, as well as at those...

Since disturbance is an important ecological factor affecting species diversity in natural environments, the increasing human occupation rate in Brazilian Atlantic rainforest, which supports about 50% of Brazil's human population, has resulted in intense habitat degradation and fragmentation. Within this rainforest, animal and plant species have been lost at a high rate, and biological and dive...

An anthropic understanding of the cosmological constant requires that the vacuum energy at late time scans from one patch of the universe to another. If the vacuum energy during inflation also scans, the various patches of the universe acquire exponentially differing volumes. In a generic landscape with slow-roll inflation, we find that this gives a steeply varying probability distribution for ...

We explore the qualitative changes that would occur if the amplitude Q ∼ 10 of cosmological density fluctuations were different. If Q ∼< 10 , the cosmological objects that form would have so low virial temperatures that they may be unable to cool and form stars, and would be so loosely bound that even if they could produce a supernova explosion, they might be unable to retain the heavy elements...

We study some gravitational instanton solutions that offer a natural realization of the spontaneous creation of inflationary universes in the brane world context in string theory. Decoherence due to couplings of higher (perturbative) modes of the metric as well as matter fields modifies the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction for de Sitter space. Generalizing this new wavefunction to be used in string ...